Fedora/Sound/XMMS
 

<newb>

I just installed Fedora and sound works for a while....then doesn't. Something crashes I gather. If I reboot, and use OSS with XMMS its fine (ALSA doesn't work) I have an A7NX8 motherboard, and any direction would be appreciated. Thanks.

</newb>

What's your output plugin in XMMS? If you for instance are listening to a series of songs and then suddenly (in a song change) the sound stops, most probably esd stopped responding, you may avoid this by just asking XMMS to use the OSS output plugin instead of the esd sound server (besides it would use less resources). However the best bet for sound on your SoundStorm is ALSA, mind you that ALSA 1.xrcx is broken, and you should look to get the 0.9.8 release which is the best for you soundcard. If you have any doubts as to how to make it work, just ask again.

Edit: And welcome to LQ!

Thanks! :D

I believe I was using OSS with XMMS. Thing is, all sound stops. I noticed when my Gaim wasn't making any noise anymore.

Problem is that with OSS you can only have ONE program to use the soundcard in an exclusive way, if you want to be able to have multiple sound sources, then you need to use a sound deamon either esd (GNOME) or arts (KDE). The problems is that these deamons eat some reasorces, since you have the A7N8X Motherboard, I don't think reasorces are a worry, but the sounds may lag or have pops and clicks. Also as the buffer gets crippled the sound deteriorates. When esd is under stress (i.e many sound sources) it will stop responding. This is a limitation in design of the OSS-Free drivers, made on purpose (unless you get the official, OSS drivers, which you have to buy). That's where ALSA kicks in, because ALSA does not have the limitation of sound sources and (in my own experience) sounds a LOT better than OSS on the SoundStorm.

Now depending on your Desktop (I assume you use GNOME) you will face more often these problems or not. As for arts I don't really know if it (if at all) stops responding, BUT I know that it is quite messy and interfers with many other applications (mainly audio intensive apps such as games).

Thanks for the help. ALSA sounds like the ticket. How do you go about installing it. I'm using the 2129 kernel.

The trick for you to NOT get unresolved symbols is as follows:

First get ALSA 0.9.8 (all packages!)
Once you have them uncompressed, go to the alsa-driver directory and:
The trick in the above code is the export CC="gcc32" statement. Why? Because FC1 comes with two compilers: gcc 3.3 (gcc command) and gcc 3.2 (used to build the kernel, gcc32 command). To avoid unresolved symbols you should ALWAYS use the same compiler with any driver module that was used to build the kernel. While you keep open the console or terminal window in which you made this, build and install the rest of the packages. You'll need (almost desperately) alsa-utils (to unmute the channels). Although you may do this from within the GUI, I usually do this in the first virtual console (ctrl+alt+f1). After you have everything installed generate the devices by running:
After this you *must* do the following to ensure the service alsasound starts at boot time and the volume values are restored:
Then:
and you may go back to your GUI (ctrl+alt+f7) and try it out. If it does not work check if you have the proper settings in your modules.conf file:
This code may vary. It was taken from my card (emu10k1 based), so you may check at the ALSA project's page (alsa-project.org) the settings for your card (I'm pretty sure they'll be almost the same as mine. So in order you may:
edit your modules.conf file (comment out the previous sound configuration, everything that has an aumix in it by preceding the line with a # sign).
build your devices.
build the driver.
build the utilities.
build the OSS and library (lib) packages.
After everything is installed run alsamixer, unmute the channels (press the m key on the desired setting to unmute) and you are ready to rock!

Just checked the ALSA project's page and the module parameters are the same as mine for the Nvidia sound, with the ovbious substitution of the module name.

Can you point me to the right directon to all the packages, and where the dir will lie? Thanks again. I'm sure curious to know what makes my sound just quit.

edit: ran synaptic today and it installed a whole bunch of alsa stuff....1.0.0rc2

Since you installed trhough apt-get, you could check:

• Your modules.conf file to see if you have the settings applied correctly (otherwise the modules loaded will still be the OSS ones).
• Check if the modules are loaded:
  
  Code:

  ---

  $ /sbin/lsmod | grep snd

  ---

  This is my output:
  
  Code:

  ---

  snd_pcm_oss            53028  0
snd_mixer_oss          19136  2 snd_pcm_oss
snd_seq_midi            8416  0
snd_emu10k1_synth      7808  0
snd_emux_synth        37504  1 snd_emu10k1_synth
snd_seq_virmidi        7552  1 snd_emux_synth
snd_seq_midi_event      7936  2 snd_seq_midi,snd_seq_virmidi
snd_seq_midi_emul      7936  1 snd_emux_synth
snd_seq                55312  5 snd_seq_midi,snd_emux_synth,snd_seq_virmidi,snd_seq_midi_event,snd_seq_midi_emul
snd_emu10k1            95620  2 snd_emu10k1_synth
snd_rawmidi            25056  3 snd_seq_midi,snd_seq_virmidi,snd_emu10k1
snd_pcm                99364  2 snd_pcm_oss,snd_emu10k1
snd_timer              25412  2 snd_seq,snd_pcm
snd_seq_device          8136  6 snd_seq_midi,snd_emu10k1_synth,snd_emux_synth,snd_seq,snd_emu10k1,snd_rawmidi
snd_ac97_codec        54148  1 snd_emu10k1
snd_page_alloc        11780  2 snd_emu10k1,snd_pcm
snd_util_mem            4480  2 snd_emux_synth,snd_emu10k1
snd_hwdep              9504  1 snd_emu10k1
snd                    51556  15 snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_seq_midi,snd_emux_synth,snd_seq_virmidi,snd_seq_midi_event,snd_seq,
snd_emu10k1,snd_rawmidi,snd_pcm,snd_timer,snd_seq_device,snd_ac97_codec,snd_util_mem,snd_hwdep
soundcore              9088  2 snd

  ---

• See if you have the service up and running:
  
  Code:

  ---

  # service alsasound status

  ---

• And finally see if you have installed alsamixer to be able to unmute/restore the volume values:
  
  Code:

  ---

  $ rpm -qa | grep alsa-utils (this will see what version do you have installed)
$ rpm -ql alsa-utils<version> (this will tell you what files did the package install)

  ---

I originally said that you should use ALSA 0.9.8 because the 1.0.0rc(1,2) have problems with the OSS emulation in SoudStorm cards. This is most noticeable in games, specially any game based on the Quake engine (from Quake1, to Quake 3 engine based games), like Quake 1, Quake 2, Quake 3, RTCW, Enemy Terrotory, Quake 1 Tenebrae, etc.

You can get this version of ALSA from this page: [url]ftp.alsa-project.org[/i], just navigate the directory structure for the different packages (driver, lib, utils, tools, oss).
Once you've got them, uncompress them and follow the compilation instructions I gave you in the previous post.

By the way, if you really want to know what did apt-get install, just issue this command:
This will give you every package installed with the keyword alsa.

Hello,
I am having basically the same problem, I have a KD7A mother board, brand new, I just got done throwing this computer together about 3 days ago, and of course I had to put Fedora on it. My sound will play xmms but it will stop after a song and give me an xmms error about sound not being configured properly, then I get all kinds of gaim sounds (from conversations that conspired during the last song). So basically I can't listen to two things @ once.
I downloaded all the ALSA 0.9.8 packages (driver, oss, tools, utils, lib)
When i go to compile the driver I get this error:


gcc32 -D__KERNEL__ -DMODULE=1 -I/usr/local/src/alsa-driver-0.9.8/include -I/lib/modules/2.4.22-1.2149.nptl/build/include -O2 -mpreferred-stack-boundary=2 -march=athlon -DLINUX -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -fomit-frame-pointer -Wno-trigraphs -O2 -fno-strict-aliasing -fno-common -pipe -DALSA_BUILD -DKBUILD_BASENAME=serialmidi -c -o serialmidi.o serialmidi.c
serialmidi.c: In function `open_tty':
serialmidi.c:164: invalid operands to binary >
make[1]: *** [serialmidi.o] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/local/src/alsa-driver-0.9.8/drivers'
make: *** [compile] Error 1

I was wondering if i need to change something or what my problem could be....
The sound card I'm using is the one that comes on board on the KD7A motherboard.

Any Help would be great.
Thanks

Mark

VideoLAN for all media
 

I don't have any media playing problems since I switched to VideoLAN, give it a try.

You say that the sound plays and then stops? then chnage the output plugin of XMMS from esd to OSS, in a bit I'll post explaining how to install ALSA in FC1

For what I asee you have tried to set the CC environment variable to gcc32, because otherwise ALSA will complaint about a kernel & module compiler mismatch. Just to be sure, you have to invoque the ./configure and make commands with CC="gcc32" or
Edit:

Just a silly question, do you have your kenrel sources installed?